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Judge Accuses Microsoft Of Courtroom Shenanigans In Ongoing Xbox Live Suit
by Kris Graft
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July 2, 2009
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After nearly five years of litigation, Microsoft is still butting heads with patent holders who filed suit against the Xbox house for patent infringement -- and a U.S. District Court Judge is getting cranky.
In 2004, Peter A. Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum filed suit against Microsoft and Sony, accusing the companies of infringing on the 1994 patent, "Apparatus and method for electrically connecting remotely located video games." The pair said Microsoft and Sony infringed on the patent with Xbox Live and Sony's gaming network, now known as PlayStation Network.
Sony settled out of court in April this year, according to a report on the video game patent specialist site Patent Arcade, but Microsoft is still a defendant in the case.
Now, a U.S. District Court judge has accused Microsoft lawyers of courtroom shenanigans that he said were intended to delay proceedings.
In May this year, Judge Paul D. Borman denied Microsoft's lawyers a request to submit case documents and reports after an October 2008 discovery deadline. Borman also called out Microsoft counsel for providing the plaintiff this year with over 140,000 marketing documents with no index, with little time before the June trial was to kick off.
Borman wrote in a court filing that the plaintiff requested the marketing documents on February 13, and on March 23, "Microsoft began to roll out, over a period of eight days, 143,733 documents in response..." Separately, Borman also said Microsoft wasted the court's and the parties' time by disputing a typographical error that read "2008" instead of "2009".
"This misconduct will be the subject of a separate Court Order directing Microsoft to explain why its counsel should not be sanctioned under 28 U.S.C. § 1927 for unreasonably and exatiously multiplying the proceedings," the judge said.
Borman ordered Microsoft to provide the plaintiffs with an index for the volumes of marketing documents, and said Microsoft is barred from using those documents against the plaintiffs.
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Also, shenanigans is an awesome word!
Really, anyone can patent any shit and sue anyone...
Sony for example, patented a game where you throw the screen on the ground... If someday someone invent a ridiculous game like this, they will get sued... That just suck, the current patent system only serves to create suefests, not to protect author ideas...
But the patent system also allows the use of such technologies to whoever uses it. Microsoft and Sony are very very old companies and understand this more than anyone, before they use a technology they get the damn patent. It really is not that complicated. If the patens is owned by someone else they need to acquire the right to use it or get it.
They know this very well and in a court case for Sony's dualshock controller technology there are reports of Sony attempting to do so with the defendant but failing. They went ahead and stole the technology anyway and infringed on the patent costing them to settle for millions.
These companies know what they are doing, Microsoft has been doing the same thing over and over again, Remember when the huge scandal when they forced Internet Explorer on Windows OS? That case went to the damn Supreme court for monopolistic crimes.
This is all just unethical corporate crime at its highest level. To shed light on this disgustingness I think it is good to say the Game industry may have a bit less of this unethical behavior compared to the rest of corporate america. It's safe to say that the most of us are here for the games and not the bureaucracy of making those games.
And as for personal experience, I worked for a startup, part of our product allowed a doctor to bring up their digital X-rays over the internet so they could review them wherever they were, it had some basic zoom and image cleanup (sharpen/contrast/etc.) built in but nothing special that you haven't seen at other photo sites. We got a 2 inch thick packet in the mail with a cease letter on top because someone thought we were infringing on a patent that they held for "displaying medical images in a web browser". That's right, we were being sued because the image we displayed was of a medical nature. I just have to wonder what idiot in the patent office thought that it was a good idea to give someone a patent for serving up images on the internet just because they happened to be medical and not something else like porn... but there's probably a patent out there for that too.
If you don't remember you should probably read up.
Sounds like this "apparatus and method" is the internet. I call the entire case itself one big shenanigan.
Otherwise my opinion was all ready stated by Mr. Gomes. The patent system needs are serious over haul. It is broken on several fundamental levels.
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-User_Dungeon
The MUD article on Multi User Dungeons are rather interesting,
the history part as early as from 1978 mentions multiple simultaneous players,
a lot of these MUDs was played on BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) in later years.
And I know for sure I played agaist other real time opponents on a larger BBS, and this was before 1991 when the patent was filed.
Also in the Wiki entry for Multi User Dungeon is the mention of graphical MUDs, in particular:
"A graphical MUD is a MUD that uses computer graphics to represent parts of the virtual world and its visitors. A prominent early graphical MUD was Habitat, written by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar for Lucasfilm in 1985. Graphical MUDs require players to download a special client and the game's artwork. They range from simply enhancing the user interface to simulating 3D worlds with visual spatial relationships and customized avatar appearances."
I know, I know. The patent refers to "said controller, said whatever" but it doesn't take half a brain to take a single player "joystick" and hook that up to a graphical MUD or MMO.
Which makes me wonder why the patent holders haven't made claim sooner but waited until the video games "got internet", seemingly ignoring the fact that folks had been gaming online against/with each other on PC's, Amiga's, Mainframes, long before the patent was filed even.
The fact that Microsoft and Sony added internet abilities should not automatically cause them to break the patent. Microsoft simply added features to the consoles that had existed and been in use for many many years before.
I hope someone can point out the MUD article out to the legal team at Microsoft, (failed to find any contact info on the microsoft site and got tired of looking)
because if this claim goes through, who knows whats next? PC online gaming, Wow?
Whatever happen to the original intent of patents?
Was it not supposed to give the inventor a limited exclusivity to profiting on the invention and get a "head start" on any competition, but then allow the public to use and benefit of the invention for free later?
The fact that the patent sat there from 1991 to 2002 ? before they suddenly cried wolf seems fishy to me, by now the patent is what.. 18 years old? Shouldn't it be public domain and belong to no-one by now?
Personally I think that after 1-2 years the exclusivity should end, if the inventor have failed to make money on it by then, let the rest of the world have a try at it, and don't complain if they do a better job at it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_%28video_game%29
A really interesting read in that it was up and running in 1986, it matches many of the claims this patent seems to mention, and the C64 (Commodore 64) had 1 or more controllers people could, etc. etc.
If the Microsoft legal team has any serious skill it should not be hard to find prior art in this.
But on the other hand, MS should play by the rules. I realize that this has more to do with MS's legal team rather than Microsoft themselves.
A valid company who patented something would thus be able to maintain their patent as long as they continued to make money from it. Effectively that's all a patent does, is serve to prevent financial loss through the theft of Intellectual Property. If you stand to make no loss then you should not be able to prevent someone else using an idea.
There is a separate issue of applying patents to software, and that is an area where the system has fallen way behind.
Anyways, the patent is due to expire in less that 2 years anyway. Let them have their day in the sun :)
In my opinion, these Patent Trolls are just a drag on our economy, serving to make a few people rich at the expense of everyone else - providing nothing in return.